Online chess revisited

Back in 1995, I found myself stumbling upon a fascinating new world of online chess. It was still the early days of Malaysia’s Internet connectivity, and the idea that you could play someone halfway across the world in real time was nothing short of thrilling. I wrote a story about this in one of my chess columns in December that year. A month later, in February 1996, I followed up with another story, this time about the Internet Chess Club (ICC) which had already captivated me to the point where I was logging in almost every day.

There was something almost magical about it. I was in Penang and find myself matched against someone in New York or Paris or Singapore, playing a real-time game on a text-based interface powered by Telnet. The chessboard was clunky, rendered in ASCII, but it worked. And for the time, it was revolutionary.

Blitz chess was already wildly popular then, but what really caught my imagination was the Fischer time control. You’d play with something like "3 15"—three minutes per player, plus 15 seconds added after every move. It was a strange new rhythm compared to our old-school five-minute blitzes. And since I’d registered as a member, my games were rated by the system. Every result tweaked your rating, right there and then. That little jolt of satisfaction (or disappointment) was addictive.

Handles, nicknames, anonymous opponents—it was a wild west of chess pseudonyms. My own handle was ssquah, naturally, while others used more cryptic tags. I even ran into an old friend from Singapore, FIDE Master Chia Chee Seng, who was an ICC administrator and helped ease me into the environment. By then, ICC had introduced paid memberships—US$49 a year, or half that for students—and while it might have seemed steep, the platform delivered. Even computers were showing up as opponents, ready to play you anytime.

The biggest usability leap came with the slics22f interface. Unlike Telnet, it gave you a graphical board and mouse-click functionality. I even demonstrated it at a local Internet Society meeting in USM. It felt like we were peeking into the future, and we were.

Fast forward nearly 30 years, and that future has well and truly arrived. Platforms like Chess.com and Lichess now host millions of users round the clock with sleek, polished interfaces, live broadcasts, integrated engines and on-demand lessons. I’m still amazed that I can log on today and watch grandmasters battle it out live while the system evaluates their every move and annotates in real time, often faster than I can process what's happening.

But perhaps what’s most striking isn’t just the playing. It’s how chess tournaments have caught up with the Internet too. These days, most over-the-board events are run using pairing software like Swiss Manager, which automates round-by-round matchups with mathematical precision. And once the pairings and results are generated, they’re seamlessly uploaded to Chess-Results.com, a global repository where you can track tournaments live from anywhere in the world. Whether it's a school-level event in Kuala Lumpur or an open in Reykjavik, results, pairings and standings are just a click away. The transparency and efficiency it offers are remarkable, and a far cry from handwritten pairing cards.

Of course, with progress comes new concerns. Online cheating has cast a shadow on the digital scene, and platforms now employ sophisticated anti-cheating tools: everything from statistical pattern detection to AI-based behavioural analysis. Some tournaments even require players to set up multiple webcams to ensure fair play. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, but the platforms are taking it seriously.

Even the way we consume chess has changed. In the past, if you missed a great game, that was that. Today, you have commentators like Daniel Naroditsky or Levy Rozman (aka GothamChess) explaining the key moments in colourful, engaging streams. YouTube have turned grandmasters into influencers. Hikaru Nakamura, once the enfant terrible of American chess, is now a global streaming star, toggling between bullet games and stock tips. It’s entertainment, education and sport all rolled into one.

And yet, as I look back at those old stories of mine, I realise that the core thrill hasn’t changed: that moment when you make your move and wait for your opponent’s reply, wherever they might be. Back then, it was ASCII boards and FTP downloads. Today, it’s touchscreen apps and cloud servers. But the chess is still eternal.

It’s tempting to feel nostalgic for the simplicity of those early Internet days. The dial-up sounds, the tiny online communities, the excitement of discovering something entirely new. But I also marvel at how far we’ve come. From ICC to Swiss Manager, from slics22f to Stockfish-assisted prep, from Telnet logins to mobile alerts saying, “Your opponent has made a move.” The game has grown in ways I never imagined.

Thirty years from now, someone else might look back and say, “Remember Chess.com? Remember Lichess? That was when online chess really took off.” And maybe, somewhere in their memory or search engine, they’ll find a trace of that curious Malaysian player who once logged in as ssquah and couldn’t believe his luck.